8000 miles X 3

In case you don’t know, I have two brothers. When I was in Rwanda, one brother Tim was in Waco, Texas and one Chris was in the Northern Marianas Islands, on Saipan. I was already looking at the map of Africa, trying to figure out where I would be in relation to what I know (no pun intended).

As I was talking with my brother in Waco, we looked at the map together. . . well. . . online together trying to figure out if Chris and I would be covering common ground. Here’s what we found.

Tim was the centerpoint. From Waco, Chris would fly one direction around the globe and I would fly the other. We would travel an equal distance to get to where we were going. Once we arrived, we would each be about 8000 miles from each other.

The earth is approximately 25000 miles around. That meant we were equally spread around the world. For us, that’s as rare as planets in conjunction.

If we had been younger, and different people, we might have considered starting a master race, well, with our own definition of master, of course.

This reminds me a bit of those word problems. If two trains leave the station at 8:00, one going west and one going east, at what point will they be equidistant from Chicago, or in our case, Waco?